Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present Fall, the gallery’s seventh solo exhibition by Oakland based artist Alicia McCarthy. For this presentation, the artist shows new drawings and large scale paintings of her characteristic colorful geometric shapes and patterns.
Alicia McCarthy’s paintings incorporate geometric shapes, grids and patterns in a distinct handmade quality that bear the artist’s hallmarks. Loose grids of intertwining woven lines suggest a rhythmic order that skips a beat at a closer look. Following the lines of the weaves, the eye is drawn deeper into the painting getting lost trying to decipher its ways. Opaque lines of pencil, crayon, spray paint or latex paint form arrays of colors while emphasizing each individual line. Splashes of paint and spray paint look like tags by the artist herself and call to mind McCarthy’s affiliation with the San Francisco “Mission School” movement of the 1990s.
The use of found wood panels instead of new bought materials exemplifies McCarthy’s predilection for the imperfect. The worn wooden surfaces and shapes unveil traces of their past and evoke a sense of individuality rather than impersonalized mass production. McCarthy’s surfaces, compositions, weaves, grids, geometric shapes and the application of paint conflate order and disarray, balancing organized systems with unfathomable twists.
Alicia McCarthy (b. 1969) received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 1994 and an MFA from the University of California at Berkeley in 2007. McCarthy has exhibited across America and internationally, and this year she received the SECA Award and recently exhibited her Award show at SFMoMA. McCarthy has received numerous accolades and residencies, most notably from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, Headland Arts Center and New Langton Art, San Francisco. Public collections with works by the artist include: MIMA the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art in Brussels, American Academy of Arts & Letters in New York City, Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, CA and Oakland Museum of California.